Xamarin: The Big Picture

This course shows you the building blocks of Xamarin, Microsoft’s solution for building mobile applications that run on any device and on any platform, and you will be able to decide whether or not it's something for you to invest in.

Course info

Rating

(35)

Level

Beginner

Updated

Mar 28, 2018

Duration

2h 15m

Description

Using Xamarin, you can create cross-platform mobile applications for the 3 major mobile platforms: iOS, Android, and UWP, all without learning a new language or getting used to a new development environment. You can keep using C#, the .NET framework, and Visual Studio to build these mobile apps. In this course, Xamarin: The Big Picture, you will learn what Xamarin is and its most important building blocks. First, you will understand what Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.iOS, and Xamarin.Forms are. Then, you will see how using Xamarin promotes the reuse of code and you will understand the different tools you can use to build apps. Finally, you will get the required information to make sure that your environment is ready to go, whether it’s a Windows PC or a Mac. By the end of this course, you’ll have a good understanding of Xamarin platform and its tooling.

Section Introduction Transcripts

Course OverviewHi everyone. My name is Gill Cleeren, and welcome to my course, Xamarin: The Big Picture. I'm a solution architect focusing on mobile and web projects. Xamarin is Microsoft's solution for building mobile applications that run on any device and any platform. Using your existing C# and. NET knowledge, developers can build mobile applications which target iOS, Android, and Windows. This course will give you an overview of the Xamarin platform and its building blocks. Some of the major topics that you will cover include comparing the different approaches for building cross-platform mobile applications, and see where Xamarin fits into the picture. You'll get an understanding of the Xamarin platform, including Xamarin. iOS, Xamarin. Android, and Xamarin. Forms. You'll see how we can save time by sharing code between the different platforms, and you'll learn how to set up your environment to get started building Xamarin applications. By the end of this course, you'll have a good understanding of the Xamarin platform, its benefits, and how to really get started building apps with Xamarin. There's really no need for any up-front knowledge to be able to follow along with this course. So I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn Xamarin with the Xamarin: The Big Picture course here on Pluralsight.

IntroductionHello, and welcome to this Pluralsight course titled Xamarin: The Big Picture. My name is Gill Cleeren, and you can find me on Twitter right @gillcleeren. As the title of this course is already giving away, you'll get an understanding of the Xamarin platform. Since this is a big-picture course, I'll try to make sure that by the end of this course, you'll have a certain understanding of the Xamarin platform, its features, and its goals. In this brief introduction module, we will be taking a look at what exactly you will get from this course. I'll give you an overview of the key learnings, so that the expectations for this course are set. I'll also talk a bit about the goals for this course, which will help you to decide if this course is something for you.

Hello XamarinHello again, and welcome to another module in the Xamarin: The Big Picture course here on Pluralsight. My name is Gill Cleeren, and I'll be guiding you through this module. This module is the actual real first module that you have in this course, and it's going to give you an overview of the Xamarin platform. After this module, you'll already have an idea what Xamarin is all about. Let's start this module with a brief overview of what we are going to learn in this module. First, before we start talking about Xamarin, I want to give you an overview of the different approaches that are commonly used in the industry to build mobile applications. Each of these will have some benefits, and of course also some downsides. When we have done a comparison, it'll be easier to understand where Xamarin fits in. Xamarin is, as you'll soon see, going to fill a certain gap that exists between the different other approaches. In the next part, what is Xamarin, we are going to quite logically take a look at the Xamarin platform. In the last part of this module, we'll discuss some apps that you may have already been using in the past that have been built with Xamarin.

The Xamarin EcosystemHi there, and welcome to another module in the Xamarin: The Big Picture course here on Pluralsight. My name is still the same as it was in the last module, so it is still Gill Cleeren. If you have any questions about this course, feel free to reach out via Twitter or via the discussion board here on the Pluralsight website. In the previous module, we have thoroughly discussed what Xamarin is all about. This module will build, of course, on that knowledge, but the focus is more on understanding and seeing the entire Xamarin ecosystem. After finishing this module, you'll have a good understanding of the paths that make up Xamarin and its tooling. Let's do as we did before, let's start a module with a brief overview of what you will be learning in this module. I will start by giving you a high-level understanding of the different building blocks that make up Xamarin. Once you have seen these and understood the difference between them, we'll dive in each of these in much more detail. We'll kick off things by looking at Xamarin. iOS, followed by a deep dive into Xamarin Android. Once that is finished, we'll start exploring Xamarin forms in the same level of detail. In the final part of this module, we'll explore some other tooling that is part of the Xamarin ecosystem, including a full devops approach to building Xamarin applications. Sounds interesting, I do hope so. Let's get started.

Code-sharing with XamarinHello everyone, and welcome to another module in the Xamarin: The Big Picture course here on Pluralsight. My name is Gill Cleeren, and you can reach me via twitter via @gillcleeren. In the previous modules, we have already referenced quite a number of times that we can share code. It is definitely one of the biggest differentiators for Xamarin applications. Although we have talked about code sharing quite a lot, we haven't really spent any time looking at this concept just yet. That'll change in this module, since we will explore the different options we have for code sharing with Xamarin. And let's start by taking a look at what we will learn in this module. First, I'm going to give you some more information about code sharing. I'll talk about what code can be shared, and why it's useful to be able to reuse a large chunk of your code base. Next, we will take a look at the different approaches supported by Xamarin for sharing code in our applications, and in the demo, we'll take a look at the simple architecture set up around code sharing. Let's get started.

Getting Your Environment Ready for XamarinHi there, and welcome to the last module of the Xamarin: The Big Picture course here on Pluralsight. Again my name hasn't changed, so also in this last module, it'll still be Gill Cleeren. If you have any questions about Xamarin or this course, please let me know via the discussion board here on the Pluralsight course page. In this last module, I'll be showing you more about the different options you have to build Xamarin applications, and also the tools that you'll need. After this module, we'll have an overview of the different options to set up your environment, and how to get started with Xamarin. For the last module of this course, we will also start with a small overview of what you will be learning in this module. The good news is that the outline for this module is pretty simple. We'll take a look first at how you set up a Windows PC for Xamarin. iOS and Xamarin. Android development. Next, we'll do the same, but then for a Mac. To build Xamarin. Android, Xamarin. iOS, and Xamarin. Forms applications, we will use Visual Studio. On Windows, we will use Visual Studio, and that will come with support for developing Android, iOS, and Windows applications. When working with a Mac, we will also use Visual Studio, in this case Visual Studio for Mac. On the Mac, we get the ability to build applications for Android, iOS, and Mac OS, so the desktop version. It is no wonder that on a Mac, we cannot build Windows applications. Similarly on a Windows machine, it's also not possible to build a Mac OS application.